Flight (5 page)

The arm moves from the armrest, and Kit’s hand drops onto her leg. His fingers burrow toward her inner thigh.

“We’re going to have a good time,” he says. Leanne looks up at
his face. It’s a young, open face, but little knowing crinkles radiate out from his eyes. He has blond hair. Of the Gruens, only Trevor, Margaret’s little boy, is blond, and his hair will no doubt darken to the family’s signature brown.

“A good time getting married?” she says. “It seems like a big hassle to me.”

“
Being
married,” he says. “Although that might be a hassle sometimes, too.”

Leanne puts her head back against the seat and closes her eyes. He wants to be married to her when he doesn’t even know her, just as he’s sure he can make his documentary when he hasn’t met any of the subjects yet. His Spanish is great, and he’s been to Mexico City before, but still. Part of her can’t help but suspect his certainty, his ability to be so positive about things, like Margaret, or their father. It’s not Leanne’s nature. Maybe she and Kit are a bad match.

It’s nice with her eyes closed. She doesn’t have to look out the window at the New York skyline minus the Towers, a sight that, almost a year later, still makes her stomach lurch with shock. She concentrates on how good it feels to do nothing. The last few days have been a frenzy of annoying preparations, with multiple phone calls to Michigan to confirm details with her mother. The country club is booked, the caterers confirmed, last-minute changes to the luncheon menu have been approved, the photographer and church have received their deposits. It’s a June wedding, but not a traditional one. She wanted something simple and short, even declining to have a wedding party: Margaret will stand up with Leanne, and her cousin Eddie will stand up for Kit, who has no male relatives of his own.

The plane inches forward. She can’t talk to Kit while the plane is on the ground, she decides, because if something happens and they don’t take off, it will seem as though fate has ordered them not to marry. And all of a sudden she
does
want to marry him. She wants to tell him everything and, in telling it, have it disappear, so he can understand why she can’t come to Mexico, and then they can go forward from there. She’ll tell him when they’re in the air. She has always liked being in airplanes. They’re a place where time has
stopped, where you’re not home nor yet away, but suspended, you and the small world around you. It’s the closest thing there is to being nowhere.

“We should have gone by Greyhound,” Kit murmurs next to her. “At least then we’d be in the bus lane.”

Leanne wakes up when someone screams. Her head has been leaning sideways, and her neck is so sore she holds it still, avoiding any quick movement. As she reaches a hand up to massage it slowly back into place, the plane pitches violently to the left and snaps her upright.

She leans out into the aisle. Everyone else in the cabin looks frozen, some sleeping or feigning sleep, others simply holding still. The only movement is the synchronous bobbing of heads as the plane commences a strange, shuddery wobbling. There’s another stomach-churning jolt, and Leanne turns to Kit. He has his hands clenched together in front of his stomach and is holding himself in an oddly tight way. His face is pale, but he smiles at her. Her heart jumps with concern, and in that moment, it’s clear to her that she loves him. She reaches a hand out and touches her fingertips to his balled fists. Because of the plane’s wobble, they tap up and down on the back of his hand, as if she’s trying to wake him up.

“What’s going on?” she whispers.

“Turbulence,” he says. She notices that his knuckles are stretched thin and white with tension.

“Someone screamed.”

It takes him a moment to reply. “
Bad
turbulence,” he says. He takes a deep breath, and Leanne realizes that his tight posture and pale countenance are the result not of fear but of nausea. She leans forward and paws through her seat-back magazine compartment. There’s an in-flight magazine, an in-flight catalog, an in-flight entertainment guide, and a couple of crumpled napkins. Don’t airlines provide airsickness bags anymore? Or were they somehow a security problem, too?

“I’ll be okay,” Kit says, his voice slightly strained. He watches her with a worried expression, as if afraid she will produce what she’s searching for and that will push him over the edge. “I almost never get motion-sick.”

“I heard it helps if you use the pressure points on your wrists.” Leanne holds out a forearm and encircles one wrist with her other hand, pressing her thumb down where it’s supposed to help.

Kit looks as amused as a nauseated man possibly can. “My God, why didn’t I think of that,” he says.

The plane drops what feels like fifty feet. The falling sensation is scary, but there’s a deep throb of pleasure in it, too. Leanne thinks of her father. He fell from the sky once, when his fighter jet was shot down in Vietnam and he parachuted into the ocean. Was there a thrill in the long ride down? It’s funny, she has never heard him talk about it. Somehow the subject of the war was one they all left alone, even though it was always there, a shadow in the background.

The plane shakes and accelerates, and the overhead compartments creak. One of them has a rattling door that looks like it might give way at any moment. Leanne looks out the window. The sky is white, giving no clue about why the air should be so choppy. The plane seems to be descending, but there’s no ground visible beneath them, just shreds of white on top of thick white soup. She tries Kit’s approach, pressing her body back into her seat. When she was small, airplanes seemed so big. Of course, they really were more spacious then, before the airlines started cramming in as many bodies as they could. Things were more elegant, too. Leanne remembers dressing up to fly. When she was three, the family took their first trip abroad, to London. Carol bought Leanne and Margaret matching fur hats and muffs. They took a 747, and the upstairs was a piano bar. At dinnertime, an attendant came to their seats and carved a chateaubriand.

The plane drops again, and Leanne reflexively grips her armrests.
It would have been easier to die in those days,
she thinks. You’d have gone out in a blaze of glamour, like Princess Diana in the backseat of the speeding limo. Now it would be like falling off a cliff
in a Greyhound bus. Leanne imagines the plane ripping apart, crammed overhead compartments disgorging their cargo, passengers melding with their downsized economy seats. Pretzel bags, plastic cups, and fanny packs would fuel the fireball.

This is always how it is in the air. Part of her believes with all her heart that these are her last moments on earth. What else is there to believe, thousands of feet in the air, powerless inside a small metal tube, tossed and jolted around like so much baggage? Every bump, every jerk, is like a message from the higher power of nature:
You do not matter. You are insignificant in the greater course of things.

And yet another part of her cannot believe that anything could possibly happen to her here. Not because of the statistical safety of airline travel, not because, as her father always told them, more people die of bee stings than plane crashes, but because this is not her life. The airplane is nowhere, merely a conduit from one part of her life to another. Cold Spring, her store, her East Coast friends: all these dwindled in significance the moment the plane rumbled into the air and turned them into tiny toylike objects. At the same time, the realities of Michigan—her family, the home she grew up in—exist only as ghosts, stored in her memory.

This nowhere enfolds her, above and outside her real life, which will restart when she lands in Michigan with her fiancé, greets her parents, drives to Ryville, and, two days later, walks down an improvised aisle outdoors at the Green Lake Country Club to become a married person. That is her real life, opening before her like a brightly lit corridor. Even the dark spots are already visible: Margaret will inevitably find fault with some aspect of Leanne’s dress; her cousin Eddie will find the most inopportune moment to call her by her old nickname, Pester; some simmering tension between her parents will make everyone uncomfortable. These things seem so certain that there’s something exhilarating, almost glorious, in the idea that they might not occur.

And so she sits, suspended between two certainties: the certainty of her imminent annihilation and the certainty of the life mapped out for her. She shifts in her seat.

“Kit,” she says, “ I have to tell you something.”

There’s a short silence before Kit’s hand finds hers. “Can it wait?” he says, his voice tight. “I’m just holding it together here.”

“It’s important.”

Kit closes his eyes. His fingers work their way between her own.

“Yowza!” It’s not the same person who screamed before but someone in front of them. The yelp follows a loud thud that sounds like some part of the aircraft being wrenched off. Immediately everything feels different. There’s a noisy drag on the plane, as if the thing hanging off is disrupting its aerodynamics, and at the same time there’s a strong surge coming from the left, like a crosswind. The nose points steeply down, and Leanne concentrates on how the curtain between first class and coach falls forward, marking their angle of descent. It holds steady at about 18 degrees.

At her side, Kit has gone limp, eyes closed, breath measured. Leanne lets go of his hand to grip her armrests. She’s still staring at the curtain when the impact comes. There’s a smack, a screeching of tires, and a roaring of engines, and everyone in the airplane seems to tense, as if pressing the brakes themselves. Then it’s over. They’re on the runway, slowing down. A single apple rolls down the aisle, and with it the old beliefs, the old certainties and expectations, come crowding back into place.

The plane slows to normal speed and turns a corner at the end of the runway as if nothing unusual has occurred. The low gray terminal can be seen outside the left windows. A collective sigh of relief breaks the spell. A few people in the rear clap. Outside, a dark curtain of rain drums on the wings.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” comes the captain’s voice. “Welcome to Grand Rapids.”

RAIN POUNDS THE CAR ALL THE WAY TO GRAND Rapids. Highway depressions become flat pools. Will feels the tires beginning to skim along the surface of the water a few times, but he responds the way he responds to snow: step on the gas. Get the car to engage with the road. Everything else will sort itself out.

“This’ll be good for the corn,” he says at one point. “It was looking a little dry.”

“It’s all coming down now,” Carol responds. “So Saturday can be perfect.” It sounds more like an order than a prognosis.

At Twenty-eighth Street, Carol reminds him that they’re stopping at Meijer so she can get a few things. Reluctantly, he pulls into the massive parking lot.

“Twenty minutes,” he says in his businesslike voice. “Or else we’ll be late picking them up.”

Carol doesn’t answer, just climbs out of the car. He follows behind her, registering his concern for their timing by refusing to walk at her side. When she pulls a cart out of the corral and heads off toward the grocery section, he drops back, thinking he’ll wander over to hardware and meet her at the checkout. There’s a big display of gardening tools, and he looks at that for a minute. Then he starts walking toward the far wall, where he thinks the hardware is. He passes through some racks of clothing, then an aisle lined with books.

The book section is notoriously bad at Meijer, populated mainly by large
Family Circle
cookbooks and rows of shiny, thick paperbacks with lurid pictures on the cover. At the end of one aisle is a large display of September 11 books. Will stops, arrested by an image showing the second plane’s impact with the Tower. He’s seen it a million times, and every time it causes the same shortness of breath in him, a combination of anger and impotence. It could easily have been him. He flies for American now.
I wouldn’t have let them do it,
he can never help but think. He knows that’s absurd.

He looks over the selection, surprised at how many books there are. Not even a year later, there are commemorative books, books about firefighters, memoirs, books purporting to explain Islam’s problem with the West. He picks up a profile of one of the passengers who died in Pennsylvania, trying to retake the fourth plane. The guy’s picture is on the cover. He looks like Joe Average, smiling, buoyant, in charge of his life. He’s young, too—younger than Will. Young enough to fly for years, if he’d been a pilot.
It could have been me.
Disgusted, Will puts the book back on the shelf and turns away.

Carol is glad Will wandered off. She can get everything done faster without him. She guides the massive cart expertly down the wide aisles, aiming for produce.

She finds cherry tomatoes quickly, good ones. Pleased, she piles three pints into the cart. She looks around for sun-dried tomatoes but doesn’t see any. She goes over to the cheese section and locates a nice big log of goat cheese. Boxes of fancy crackers are stacked beneath the cheese display, and she spends some time deciding which ones to get. In the end, she decides on stoned-wheat crackers in a large box that prominently displays the British flag, and fancy biscuits that come in assorted shapes. She gets four boxes of each.

On her way back toward the fish counter, she sees a clerk and asks about sun-dried tomatoes. He directs her to the condiments aisle, where she finds them nestled among the pickles, relishes, and ketchups. She sees olives and almost grabs a couple of cans before remembering her intention to get them from the deli counter.

Margaret involved Carol very little in the plans for her wedding. She was married at the University Club in Chicago, and she and David began the festivities with a cocktail reception at the Drake Hotel. There was a rehearsal dinner at some sort of ethnic restaurant north of the city center: the food was lentil-based and very
spicy. The wedding dinner was catered by the University Club, and Margaret made all the choices without even consulting Carol. The only thing she asked for help with was shopping for her dress, and even that required little input, since Margaret had already found a dress in a magazine and simply had to try it on at the bridal salon. She tried on a few others, but Carol got the impression she did so only out of a diplomatic urge to make her mother feel involved. In the end, Margaret bought the dress she had pre-chosen, and the two of them had a nice lunch at Water Tower Place.